Thursday, May 21, 2009

slugfest

katherine is awesome. i told her about my slug-catching activities and rather than being revolted she asked me to catch her a big fat one to pre-digest her compost materials. so one night i went out and filled a jar with about a dozen slimy friends and brought them over the next day. the day after that i got a voicemail from katherine, tentatively asking me if i was disgusted by slugs or not, and eventually asking if i would come over and photograph her with slugs on her face. obviously i said yes. slugs don’t gross me out...i don’t think i’d go so far as to personally let them slime my lips and eyelids, but it was fun to watch katherine get slugged.

after i bottled up those slugs for her i watched them for a long time. i put a bunch of carrot peels and some lettuce in the jar for them to eat, and it was fascinating to watch them chow down...they eat surprisingly quickly, and you can hear the crunching, and see their mouthparts and their one big, beak-shaped tooth. some of them were crawling up the side of the jar and scraping their beaks against the glass--it was very cool looking, sort of like watching a sucker fish only you could hear the tooth scraping against the surface. and watching their undersides crawl up the glass is also way interesting. there’s this long, rippling muscle that basically acts like a conveyer belt...it never goes back and forth or contracts and expands, it just ripples perpetually forward. and apparently, when placed on the eyelids, it tickles like hell.